Offices Held

Clerk of the pipe May 1728-d.

Biography

Anthony Cornish was the grandson of Henry Cornish, ‘a great factor in Blackwell Hall’,2 the London cloth market, and an active city Whig at the time of the exclusion bill, who was judicially murdered on a trumped-up charge of high treason under James II. He had been in trade with his father,3 on whose behalf Joseph Addison wrote as secretary of state to Lord Stair, ambassador at Paris, 19 Sept. 1717:

Mr. Cornish, one of the most eminent citizens of London, has informed some of his Majesty’s ministers that Mr. Anthony Cornish, his son, having lost a great sum of money at play, has gone off with £2,500 of his father’s, and sailed from Dover on Sunday last, with a design, as is supposed, to proceed to Paris. His father makes it his request on this occasion that your Excellency may be desired to give such orders as you shall think proper for the finding out of the young gentleman; and it will be looked upon as a great favour if your Excellency will be so good as to persuade him in private conversation to return to his father, who will receive him with all possible kindness and freely excuse what has passed. His interest is so highly concerned in this point, that one would not think it should be difficult to bring it about, and his father hopes the more from your Excellency’s good offices, as his son has boasted of the civilities you were pleased to show him when he was at Paris about a year ago. But in case he refuse to comply in this particular, you are, in his Majesty’s name, to desire leave of the Regent, if it be necessary, to secure his person and send him to England.4

He appears to have complied, for after his father’s death he was returned unopposed as a Whig at a by-election for Ludgershall. In 1727 he stood unsuccessfully at Westbury, where his father had gone in 1710 ‘with £3,000 to turn that election’.5 He was a surety for Josiah Diston, another Blackwell Hall factor, who failed as receiver general for Middlesex in 1726.6 In 1728 he succeeded to a sinecure in the pipe office, the reversion of which had been granted to him in May 1725.7 On his death, 29 June 1728, he was succeeded as clerk of the pipe by his brother-in-law, Henry Holt Henley.